I'm not going to say that it's easy to make a video that caters to younger students, but when my group started brainstorming, we lamented the fact that, as future high school teachers, we had to make a video based around very complex content standards. We eventually settled on the standards relating to Greek thought and its impact on Western civilization. Someone introduced the idea of using Plato and Aristotle as actual characters in the video, and our idea evolved from there.
Since I was going to play Plato and Aristotle, it fell to me to write their dialog. I decided to write their introductions to be like public service announcements or something close to that, where Plato and Aristotle are teaching kids about the importance of law and how tyrants are bad. Kind of like Bill Nye for civics, and done in sort of a tongue in cheek manner that might play well to older students.
Creating a storyboard helped us to come up with ideas and it gave us a visual guideline to follow while filming. We decided to shoot a couple of extra short scenes to round out the video, but the storyboard helped to keep the main ideas clear. I like that storyboarding is just a very basic outline that we could then build on top of. I don't know if a real movie storyboard includes every single shot, I assume it does, but because we had limited space we eventually chose to go beyond what we had drawn out because we felt like we needed more.
It'll be interesting to see how the editing pans out, but there are a lot of tools there that will really make the video work, if I can put them to good use.
Sunday, November 9, 2008
Sunday, November 2, 2008
Week 10 Blog: Wikis and the Digital Divide
Wiki
When you work in a group to complete a project, it can be difficult to organize people's schedules to meet up and discuss the project, exchange ideas, and create content. With a wiki, the barriers to collaboration are much easier to overcome. When we began working on this web page project, I wasn't sure what it would be like. I was concerned that it would be hard to get people motivated to work on the project if we couldn't discuss it in person, but so far it has been pretty easy to add and edit content. Because group members can work on the page at any time that is convenient for them, we can get more work done more quickly. I'm more of a night person, so I can add content late and people who do more work in the morning or during the day can look at what I've done and give feedback. Putting together a page like this on my own would take up a lot of my time and energy, but with a small group collaborating online, I can spend some time each day on the page, but I don't have to kill myself creating content.
Digital Divide
I think this week's article made an interesting point about giving students access to computers. Availability of funds is obviously a major issue when it comes to providing students access to technology, but Swain and Pearson point out that the way technology is organized and implemented is more important than just having lots of computers. For instance, some schools have large computer labs, but school administrations choose to limit access by locking the labs before and after school, or only allowing access by appointment. Even if a school has only a few computers, providing students with supervised access continuously throughout the day can go a long way towards closing the divide and giving more students meaningful interactions with computers and the internet.
When you work in a group to complete a project, it can be difficult to organize people's schedules to meet up and discuss the project, exchange ideas, and create content. With a wiki, the barriers to collaboration are much easier to overcome. When we began working on this web page project, I wasn't sure what it would be like. I was concerned that it would be hard to get people motivated to work on the project if we couldn't discuss it in person, but so far it has been pretty easy to add and edit content. Because group members can work on the page at any time that is convenient for them, we can get more work done more quickly. I'm more of a night person, so I can add content late and people who do more work in the morning or during the day can look at what I've done and give feedback. Putting together a page like this on my own would take up a lot of my time and energy, but with a small group collaborating online, I can spend some time each day on the page, but I don't have to kill myself creating content.
Digital Divide
I think this week's article made an interesting point about giving students access to computers. Availability of funds is obviously a major issue when it comes to providing students access to technology, but Swain and Pearson point out that the way technology is organized and implemented is more important than just having lots of computers. For instance, some schools have large computer labs, but school administrations choose to limit access by locking the labs before and after school, or only allowing access by appointment. Even if a school has only a few computers, providing students with supervised access continuously throughout the day can go a long way towards closing the divide and giving more students meaningful interactions with computers and the internet.
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